Genre Shifts in Israeli Campaign Advertisements: Strategies and Rhetorical Functions

The present article addresses genre shifts in Israeli political campaign in 2013, specifically written advertisements published in newspapers, on the Internet, on stickers, in leaflets, and on billboards. I examine shifts to diverse genres (protest slogans, writing on social networks, personal conversation, a math exercise etc.), and analyze various discursive and para-linguistic strategies by means of which these shifts are implemented: use of registers and sociolects identified with particular genres; syntactical, semantic and lexical repetitions; graphic, typographical, and visual elements, etc. I show that due to the expectations of the addressees regarding the reconstructed genres and the addressing parties, genre shifts may serve to fulfill two main pragmatic-rhetorical functions: (1) Promoting messages regarding the desired conduct of the voters during the elections; (2) Self-positioning of the parties, either to strengthen their existing image among the public or to create a new, surprising one. I thus emphasize the key role played by genre shifts in the intertextual phenomenon of integrating semiotic meanings into a linguistic text; specifically in this case, integrating cultural-societal meanings into campaign advertisements.